Last week, Yahoo announced that they now support the X-Robots-Tag in the HTTP header. This new tag allows you to influence how Google and Yahoo index your website pages.

What is the X-Robots-Tag?

Google introduced the new X-Robots-Tag directive in 2007 to allow webmasters to control access to non-web page documents, such as Adobe PDF files, video and audio files.

The X-Robots-Tag is included in the HTTP header of a document. The HTTP header is the initial reply of a server to a query. It contains information about the document that follows, including content type, creation date, character set, encodings, etc.

The new X-Robots-Tag allows webmasters to add information about search engine indexing to the HTTP header.